It took a few years before Micah White, the co-founder of Occupy Wall Street, could speak of the movement as a failure.

When White released the call for Occupy on 13 July 2011, the year was filled with optimism from the Arab Spring and an untested faith in the power of social media. At the time, White worked as an editor at activist magazine AdBusters. Together with its founder, Kalle Lasn, he sent out the call to 90,000 email addresses that led to the viral movement that spread to more than 750 locations worldwide.

Five years later, White found himself in a radically different spot: he announced his run for mayor in Nehalem, an otherwise quiet Oregon town of 278 residents. These days, White argues that rural areas are where the efforts of activists should be focused. Occupy Wall Street, as a movement, was unable to effect political and legislative change. But moving to small-town America still might.

Traumatized by Occupy’s dissipation, White and his wife decided to move from Berkeley to Nehalem in 2012 on the basis that it was “the most beautiful place they’d ever been” – a town whose city limits contains a total of 0.24 square miles of land.

After his move, White started to think deeply about the failures of Occupy.

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“It took me a year to even think that Occupy could be the end of protest. And then it took another year after that to be able to talk about this publicly,” White explained. “Many activists don’t want to hear about it, because protest is an industry.”

The brutal removal of the Zuccotti Park tent camp by police forces made White realize that street protests have become outdated. “It demonstrated that a mass movement in the streets doesn’t attain higher sovereignty over its government,” White told me. “It’s not protected from police violence or eviction.”

Instead, White focused on hyper-local activism.

As word spread about the arrival of an Occupy founder in town, White’s neighbors – some who were hippies who moved in the 1970s, others who were priced out of nearby Portland – started approaching him with questions. How do we protect the local watershed? How do we vote on the construction of the parking lot?

White realized that activists can’t just take to the streets to gain power. “The only thing that works is to merge protest with political parties,” White explained. “You have to win wars, or win elections.”

Prior to White’s candidacy, Nehalem’s city council meetings were reasonably routine affairs. Its five members came together once a month in Nehalem’s city hall, a single-story wooden structure that reminds of the history of western pioneers that preceded the town.

One month the vote is on the renovation of a parking lot, and another month the discussion is about the timber harvest, an industry that once made Nehalem thrive but has since wound down. Most of the time, meetings take no longer than 30 minutes. Even in a year of unprecedented political strife on the national stage, White was the only candidate to challenge a mayoral race in Nehalem’s Tillamook County.

White staged his first protest at 13years old and is as close as one can get to be considered a career activist. Yet, moving to a rural community made him reconsider the techniques he had been employing.

“People in urban areas forget that there’s a whole other reality,” he said. “In rural America, you can’t use standard activist techniques such as blocking the streets, because those people are your neighbors.”

An Occupy activist on the fifth anniversary of the movement in September 2016. Photograph: Mary Altaffer/AP

When White made his announcement on 15 July, the national media had not yet started to show the interest it now holds in America’s heartland. It was almost four months before that election night, when America, glued to the television, watched former Democratic strongholds flip red piece by piece, leading Donald Trump to victory. (Tillamook County, which had voted Obama for both terms, ended up electing Trump. It hadn’t voted red since Reagan’s win in 1984.)

White’s rural mission had started much earlier. His book, The End of Protest: A New Playbook for Revolution, was released in March 2016. In it, he describes Occupy as a “constructive failure”, urging activists to apply lessons learned: “Change won’t happen through old models of activism. Protests have become an accepted, and therefore ignored, by-product of politics-as-usual.”

Small-town America, on the other hand, was where White saw the potential to apply the participatory democracy that Occupy’s leaderless organization failed to achieve.

“Nehalem represents one revolutionary scenario for building power in rural communities,” White writes. “The rural uprising begins when revolutionary activists distribute ourselves into pre-existing micro-cities in Cascadia [the Pacific north-west region that includes Oregon], ensuring that in each place there are enough of us to sway every local election.”

White released his announcement to run in an open letter he sent to every registered voter in town. He wrote, “I’m concerned because the majority of our city council – four out of five – were not elected by voters: they were appointed to their current positions by decree.” He continued by pleading for more power to the residents: “Sadly, the undemocratic process of appointments has fostered a city council culture that is unresponsive, unimaginative and unprepared for navigating our city into the future.”

In the same letter, White also called for the first meeting of the Nehalem People’s Association, a neighborhood organization whose meetings would provide an open platform for residents to discuss local issues. More than 60 people showed up at the first meeting at the local community centre, which amounts to 20% of Nehalem’s total population.

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“Imagine that in New York,” White said. “That would be the equivalent of 1 million people.” For White, Nehalem can be seen as a microcosm of America: no matter how small the town is, it has its own portion of income inequality and political strife. This means that if a new form of democracy can be created in Nehalem, it could be possible in every other city in America.

“The left is not revolutionary and doesn’t want to govern. The real revolutionaries now, unfortunately, is the right,” White explained. “Trump doesn’t sit around whining whether he’s able to govern. He just does.”

‘What makes you an expert?’

If Nehalem is a microcosm of America, then the arrival of the newcomer has caused a similar division among the town’s population.

At the first Nehalem People’s Association meeting, a group of residents showed up wearing “Keep Nehalem, Nehalem” sweatshirts. One of those residents, who spoke to me on the condition of anonymity, said that half of the 60 people at the meeting showed up just to express their dismay at White’s efforts. The loosely bound organization has been vocal against White’s efforts in Nehalem. Recently, a resident started offering bumper stickers featuring the campaign’s motto on the group’s Facebook page.

The support of the resident-led movement goes out to Bill Dillard, White’s opponent in the mayoral race. Dillard, who grew up in Nehalem, is a familiar face to many. He has been on the city council since 2003, his father served on the city council for many years before, and he’s worked as a local firefighter for 14 years. If Micah’s agenda was change, then Dillard ran on the sentiment of those who wanted to maintain the status quo.

In a letter addressed to White, Dillard writes, “Your newsletter has quite a laundry list of things that you envision for Nehalem’s future. After your three and a half years here, what makes you the expert on what the City of Nehalem needs?” His letter ends with a word of advice: “Mr White, Nehalem is not a political experiment. It’s our home.”

Nehalem’s local press fell between the gaps of the increasing divide. In an article titled “Nehalem and the n-word: campaign tactics go low and grow”, the North Coast Citizen, a local newspaper, reported on racial slurs targeting White since he announced his bid for mayor.

White is African American while Nehalem, according to the latest census, is 93% white. One resident, Steve Meadows, is reported to have sent White a text containing a photo of ‘Nehalem’ tattooed over a bare stomach. The paper quoted him saying, “Because he’s a nigger, that’s why.”

This could be the end of protest. Many activists don’t want to hear about it, because protest is an industry

After the article’s publication, the paper received backlash from some readers, angry that their town had been painted racist over the actions of a few – some even called upon their neighbors to cancel their subscriptions. The reporter left the paper soon after the article’s publishing, and the article has since been removed (a transcript can still be found on White’s Facebook page). Joe Warren, the paper’s publisher, told me her leave was not related. “It’s a little community, they don’t get a lot of hard news written about them,” he said. “And suddenly there’s a new twist in a small town that they had never seen before, by someone well-known nationwide trying to make his way in.”

Jeremy Robert Mulcahy-Hill, a 30-year-old resident who has lived in Nehalem for over half of his life, explained: “Very little of us knew that Micah even lived here. We just didn’t know how he fits into the community, how he’s been giving back, and how he’s been interacting with the rest of the population. And all of a sudden, he was running for mayor.”

Mulcahy-Hill ran for city council this cycle but unwillingly got dragged into the controversy. A millennial, he is from a different generation than the incumbent council. He explained: “It turned into an us v them, the incumbents v the challengers. And if you were a challenger, you automatically got lumped in with Micah’s theology.”

According to Mulcahy-Hill, the tension grew so strong that one perspective council member retracted from the election. “It started as adults being adults, and wanting the betterment of the community, and it turned into a high school popularity contest.”

The exact measure of the national and local divisions became clear on 8 November. White lost the election with 139 votes to 36, while Mulcahy-Hill lost to incumbent Stacy Jacobson, a longtime Nehalem resident with many ties to the community.

After his loss, White continued to attend city council meetings and is set on continuing his political mission. “There’s never been a positive social change that hasn’t been met with a tremendous amount of negative resistance, and that resistance always starts with the majority,” White told me. “Look at women’s rights, or even American democracy. If you go back to the American revolution, there were tons of royalist Americans who were opposed to it.”

But what if Nehalem simply isn’t ready for change? If this year’s political upheaval has made anything clear, it’s that in politics, timing is as decisive as reason. Trump’s rise to the presidency is only possible after a time in which the nation’s rural-urban divide and income gap have been brewing for decades. White had attempted viral movements before, but Occupy only spread when it fed on the right mixture of internet culture and economic meltdown.

Now that many democracies seem to be making an unthinkable return to authoritarianism, it has never been a better time to stop thinking of our post-war stability as the end point and start to reconsider what the future will look like. White, as a abstract and explosive thinker, is more often too early than too late. The success of his efforts will depend on whether he can sustain his movement until the window is right, and when rural America will be ready for the change foreseen by the pundits on the coasts.

For now, the seeds have been planted in Nehalem’s soil. “Before Micah was here, you’d hear about council meetings and there were two or three people who attended,” Mulcahy-Hill told me. “Now it’s a full house – you might as well buy tickets.”

This article was amended on 6 January 2017. A previous version incorrectly identified the year in which Tillamook County last voted for a Republican presidential candidate.